I like to have a hunt around for quotes that go with the Inktober prompt of the day if I’m stumped for artistic inspiration.

I like Carl Jung’s work, what I’ve read of it that is, which most probably isn’t much in the grand scheme of things. I do know how he used mandalas in therapy, both for himself and with patients. He believed they represented what was going on in our unconscious minds and so could reveal things to us about ourselves that we are unaware of, that are otherwise hidden, guarded.

I happen to like mandalas, a lot. So, today I thought I’d incorporate this quote from the man himself into a mandala and just let my creativity flow as unconsciously as I could.

I must admit, the colour choices I made aren’t ones I would ordinarily choose to plonk together, but I went with them.

I did create the lettering in Publisher and import the file into Autodesk Sketchbook Pro. My hand lettering skills aren’t, I feel, up to lettering in a circle; also, I’m very tired this morning and I think I’ll soon be back abed to continue to sleep.

I did draw and colour the mandala digitally. My past artistic records show that I am more than capable of creating mandalas on paper with the use of compasses, protractors and rulers, but the tools available digitally open up a whole new realm of possibility in creating mandalas by me.

What excites me about it is that I can draw the mandala as if I was using a pen on paper by using the Surface Pen on the screen of my Surface Studio. I still get human imperfections in my drawings – slightly wobbly lines, imperfect repetition of lines and so on.  I choose to use a pen ‘brush’ that isn’t perfectly smooth in the line it draws on my digital paper. This time, I coloured the mandala as if I was using coloured pencils and a blender pencil on paper, but did this digitally.

It does save an awful lot of time too. If I were to draw and colour this traditionally it would take me at least a whole day. It’s taken me around 3 hours to do this small mandala.

So, it’s odd that a rather more traditional mandala was created today. The simpler patterns and lines perhaps reflecting how tired I am feeling at present. It is a struggle to keep my eyes open. It was really difficult to even do the simple steps involved in watermarking, resizing and saving the finished mandala.